Getting started with Synergy

If you want to try Synergy to see how it helps manage your architecture, engineering or construction design projects and practices, it’s good to know the steps you’ll go through to get up and running in your 30-day free trial.

Here we’ve outlined the login and set up process, the getting started guide, and the free online sessions we offer to help you get the most from Synergy.

Two-step sign up

The sign-up process is simple — less than 60 seconds!

Create a profile

This is your personal profile for Synergy. You can be a member of more than one organisation and your profile will cross between however many you’re in. This profile is also what you login to shared project portals with.

Create your organisation

You need an organisation in order to add staff and contacts, create projects, send invoices, and so on.

That’s it, you’re in!*

Now let’s see what’s involved in the Synergy getting started guide.*Free trials default to Enterprise level — you can change your product level in your subscription settings.

Synergy getting started guide

In the Synergy getting started guide you can either experiment with a sample organisation — complete with partially populated project information (data you can play with without affecting your own organisation setup) — or follow the Synergy getting started guide with steps to set up your own organisation and data.

If you choose the ‘set up your organisation’ path, these are the steps to follow:

Set up rates and financial information — this is a crucial step. Synergy will give you default rates based on the primary industry you selected when setting up your organisation. You should update these to suit your practice’s charge-out and overtime rates, and set the organisation-wide financial controls.

Add staff — unless you’re a one-person business, you’ll want to get your staff involved so you can test Synergy fully. In this step, you add staff, set their rates, and enter information to establish their cost (vital to ensure you know your profit).

Create projects — here you get to add billable projects for each job you’ve got on, and non-billable projects for internal projects to book time against non-billable tasks. You can also import projects and financials using Excel if you want to.

Timesheets — the one you’re really excited about! Add timesheets for project tasks and submit cash and travel expense claims. You can also start a timer to instantly track time on project tasks.

Templates — Synergy projects come with default document folder structures and sample document templates. Edit the default folder structure so each new project gets the structure you want. Edit bookmarks, tables and formatting in the document templates, and edit work breakdown templates for project stages and tasks.

Online sessions to help you get started

Once you’ve signed up for a trial, our customer success team will be in touch to schedule a product demo and some online sessions at a time that suits you.

These sessions take you through the whole set up process in depth. We highly recommend getting online on each of these sessions. You can also sign up for a getting started webinar.

Sample organisation

The Synergy sample organisation is there to let you play with what we call ‘demo data’ — this is information and data we’ve created to give you a feel for projects, tasks, invoicing, reports, contact records and lots more. Some projects are more complete than others (on purpose) so you can enter new information and experiment without making your own organisation’s data messy.

The sample organisation data resets every seven days.

Get started

What’s next? Check out the Synergy features or hit that ‘start free trial’ button and take Synergy for a spin — free for 30 days!